‘Dead heart’ gives new life to a 57-year-old sufferer!

ELATED surgeons in Australia have performed the first heart transplant using a “dead heart”.

Donor hearts from adults usually come from people who are confirmed as brain dead, but with a heart still beating.

A team at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney revived and then transplanted a heart which had stopped beating for up to 20 minutes.

The first patient – to receive this revolutionary heart surgery – a 57-year-old woman, said she felt a decade younger.

Michelle Gribilas, who was suffering from congenital heart failure, had the operation more than two months ago.

Now, she says: “I’m a different person altogether. I feel like I’m 40 years old – I’m very lucky.”

The surgeons involved have experienced two further two successful operations since the breakthrough.

Prof Peter MacDonald, head of St Vincent’s heart-transplant unit, said: “This represents a major inroad to reducing the shortage of donor organs.”

The heart is the only major organ not used after it has stopped working, which is known as donation after circulatory death.

Beating hearts are normally taken from brain-dead people, kept on ice for around four hours and then transplanted to patients.

The novel technique used in Sydney involved taking a heart that had stopped beating and reviving it in a machine known as a “heart-in-a-box”.

The heart is kept warm, the heartbeat is restored and a nourishing fluid helps reduce damage to the heart muscle.

It is believed that the heart-in-a-box, which is now being tested at sites around the world, could save up to 30% more lives by increasing the number of available organs.

And, as to be expected, the breakthrough has been welcomed around the world, with the British Heart Foundation describing it as a “significant development”.

Maureen Talbot, a senior cardiac nurse at the charity, told the BBC: “It is wonderful to see these people recovering so well from heart transplantation when, without this development, they may still be waiting for a donor heart.”

A special machine keeps the donor liver functioning at body temperature, and similar methods of warming and nourishing organs before transplant have been used to improve the quality of lung and liver transplants.

James Neuberger, associate medical director at the UK’s NHS Blood and Transplant service, said: “Machine perfusion (the process of a body delivering blood to a capillary bed in its biological tissue) is an opportunity to improve the number and quality of organs available for transplant.

“We look forward to more work being carried out to determine the impact of this technology on increasing the number of organs that can safely be used for transplant, and on improving the quality of those organs.”

He added: “It is too early to predict how many lives could be saved through transplantation each year if this technology were to be adopted as standard transplant practice in the future.”

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on Oct 31 2014. Filed under Health & Beauty.
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